“The Fits,” a dreamy, beautifully syncopated coming-of-age tale, takes place in and around a recreational center that could not look less inviting. It’s the usual impersonal slab, the kind that municipalities have been building for decades to educate, or sometimes just to warehouse, restless young bodies and minds. The girls who congregate at this particular center in Cincinnati, though, have their own desires, which they express with fists and feet, grace and power. They move — fluidly, ferociously and with escalating mystery — to their own transporting beat.

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Movie Review: ‘The Fits’

The Times critic Manohla Dargis reviews “The Fits.”

The same holds true of “The Fits,” a singular first feature from the young director Anna Rose Holmer, who’s made a movie that can feel like a memory. The story — Ms. Holmer wrote the script with one of the movie’s producers, Lisa Kjerulff, and its editor, Saela Davis — is elemental, elliptical and radiates out from its sun, the 11-year-old Toni (the wonderful Royalty Hightower). One of those quiet, watchful girls (either naturally shy or tactically stoic), Toni all but lives at the recreational center, specifically the boxing club where she works out with her older brother, Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor), throwing punches and counting situps as she gasps for her next breath.

Toni’s boxing routine derails after she peers through a center window one day and discovers a new world — a dance team called the Lionesses. They’re a gorgeously variegated group, these girls, who come in all sizes, shapes, hues, hairstyles and degrees of coordination. Some fill the room with vertiginous movement, with spinning limbs and whipping hair that turn their practice room into an Abstract Expressionist canvas of slashing, swooping lines. Other girls just get tangled up and collapse like pickup sticks (all flailing, all flopping). Yet even these fumblers keep chasing the group beat, waving their arms while together everyone pumps their hips.

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Royalty Hightower in a scene from “The Fits.”Credit...Oscilloscope

Curious, Toni joins the Lionesses (what’s the worst that can happen?, her brother shrugs); it isn’t a fast fit. Trained in the boxing club, she jabs more easily than she turns, but she’s strong; another new recruit, Beezy (Alexis Neblett, a charmer), calls her “Guns,” a nod to her muscled arms. But Toni keeps at it, awkwardly miming the moves of the older girls while studying their rites, as when she observes two beauties primping before a mirror. In time, she also picks up their language: She pierces her ears, wears nail polish and flashes a smile. The drill that the Lionesses practice is part joyous self-expression, part ritualistic bluff, which makes it a perfect manifestation of adolescence.

Ms. Holmer leads with atmosphere and space (including that landscape called the human face), and tends to let the sumptuously textured visuals and intermittent blasts of percussive music express what the characters don’t. (The cinematographer is Paul Yee, another talented newcomer.) Just at the point when the movie seems to be settling into familiar indie-film narrative drift, the older girls begin having inexplicable seizures, fits. One after another, they violently succumb, bodies shuddering and falling in front of their mesmerized team members. The girls are horrified by these spells, but they’re also fascinated maybe especially because the victims soon recover.

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Clip: ‘The Fits’

Royalty Hightower in a scene from the film.

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Royalty Hightower in a scene from the film.CreditCredit...Andrew Spear for The New York Times

An outsider is called in to investigate the attacks, and there’s talk of contaminated water. The inquiry adds a hint of drama to the minimalist plot, but is finally irrelevant to the seizures, their enveloping mysteriousness and profound impact on Toni. Are these Freudian fits, “Crucible”-like convulsions, orgiastic reveries, initiation ceremonies (into femininity, etc.) or sly performances from attention-hungry adolescents? If the filmmakers never directly say, it’s because they don’t have to. Gender is some kind of performance (hysterical, hysterically absurd). And anyway Toni figures it out. This is, after all, her story, as the expressionistic cinematography underscores.

As Toni shifts between the boxing club (she helps her brother clean up) and the dance team, “The Fits” seems to be inching into perilously schematic ground. There’s something altogether too neat-sounding about a story in which a prepubescent girl overtly coded as a tomboy travels back and forth — with inquisitiveness and periodic unease — between these distinctly gendered spaces. The miracle of the movie is that, like Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it’s free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons. Any uplift that you may feel won’t come from having your ideas affirmed, but from something ineluctable – call it art.